World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) (36 page)

Beauregard appeared relieved, and even grateful, that Dev had come up with this excuse to justify his remaining behind. Both he and Dev knew there wasn’t much likelihood of
Milady Frog
taking off. Trundell and Stegman probably knew it too. Now, however, there was a fig-leaf to cover Beauregard’s act of self-sacrifice. It was a tiny, slender one, but it would do.

Stegman said, haltingly, “Well, that’s a plan, isn’t it? Makes sense.”

“I can see the logic,” said Trundell.

But neither man could meet Beauregard’s eyes as he helped them put on the shieldsuits.

The suits had the bulky profile of EVA spacesuits, but were lighter and more durable, each weighing less than twenty kilos all told. The shell was ceramic, coated with a layer of heat-resistant graphene. The joints were a flexible polyaramid-fibre weave also coated with graphene.

The faceplates on the helmets were borosilicate glass inset in a narrow, roughly V-shaped slit – little more than visors, really. They had to be that small, because they were the shieldsuits’ most vulnerable component. The glass had the lowest melting point of all of the suit materials and would succumb to Iota Draconis’s furnace-like blast before any other part did.

Once Trundell and Stegman were fully suited up, Dev told them to establish a three-way commplant link so that they could talk when they got outside.

He picked up his helmet, the last item left to put on.

“Beauregard...” he said.

The pilot was taking a swig from his hip flask, which he had retrieved from the cockpit floor and replenished from a bottle in the provisions cabinet. Vodka, it appeared, was his preferred tipple. Spirit of Gdansk, in fact, a particularly potent brand distilled by Polish settlers on 16 Cygni Bb, Little Warsaw, where the dry, rich soil yielded handsome potato crops.

“It’s all right,” Beauregard said. “I’m not scared. Been here before. Some of the high-altitude drop raids I ran, I never thought I’d come back from. Nearly didn’t. Blizzards of incoming fire. Wingmen falling away on either side. Every day I’ve had since the war ended has been a bonus, as far as I’m concerned. It’s all been borrowed time.”

“You’re going to try with the
Frog
, though, aren’t you? At least promise me that.”

“I’ll do my best. There’s one or two tricks I can think of. Maybe if I dicker about with the multidrop buses or reset the power breakers... But I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. Polis Plus malware’s bastardly stuff. Super thorough. Wipes everything back to factory-blank level. It’s like a thief who steals all your valuables then squats out a turd on your living-room carpet for good measure.”

“Very picturesque.”

“Just don’t waste this, Harmer. If, you know, I’m not going anywhere, make sure it wasn’t all for nothing. Make sure the Plussers don’t get their way. Alighieri’s not much, but it’s been my home for the past five years. I’d hate to see them claim it for their own. What was the Frontier War for, if it wasn’t to keep these digimentalists off our property?”

“Will do,” said Dev. “And I apologise for losing my temper in the cockpit earlier. I shouldn’t have sounded off at you. You got us safely down. Respect is due.”

“Post-crash shock. Heat of the moment. It happens.”

“Still hate all your religious crap, though.”

“Me too,” Beauregard admitted. “It’s not there just for fun. It’s there to remind me what I didn’t have when facing the Plussers, and what they thought they did. They believed that faith in the Singularity would guarantee them victory. Hah. Guess what? We fought them to a standstill. We held them to a draw. So much for gods, eh?”

Dev clamped the helmet into place. Beauregard helped him adjust it until it mated with the rest of the shieldsuit.

The suit, once complete, automatically booted up. Batteries hummed to life. The rebreather apparatus kicked in. Cryo-coolant sloshed through tubes, settling on a temperature level just above average body warmth.

Through the V of the faceplate, Dev saw Beauregard give him a thumbs-up. Dev returned it clumsily, as best the suit’s thick gauntlet would allow.

Then he turned and stomped towards Trundell and Stegman at the rear of the hold.

Stegosaurus? Trundle? Are we ready to roll?

Ready to rip that suit off you and give it to Beauregard, Stegman replied, if you call me that name one more time.

Beauregard withdrew into the cockpit, sealing off the hold from the rest of the arcjet’s interior. Then he depressurised the hold and hit the switch to lower the loading ramp.

Fierce heat rushed in from the darkness outside. Digits on the readout of Dev’s shieldsuit’s temperature gauge, visible via a head-up display projected on the faceplate, shot up. Within seconds they had reached the middle triple figures.

Sections of the hold walls, ceiling and floor began to crackle and char.

The shieldsuit compensated by increasing the energy density of cryo-coolant and upping the rate of circulation. The heat sink mounted on the back began dissipating excess heat out into the atmosphere.

A timer next to the temperature gauge calculated how long the shieldsuit would continue to be viable under present conditions. It arrived at a figure of 133 minutes, and immediately began counting down, glowing red digits superimposed on the landscape outside.

02:12:59

02:12:58

02:12:57

A little over two hours. After that, the suit’s integrity could not be guaranteed any more. Internal systems would start to break down. The nanorod-suspension cryo-coolant would increasingly lose effectiveness until it was no better than plain water. The shell would start to crack and split.

Two hours.

How far could you get in that time at walking pace? Ten kilometres under optimal conditions, and the conditions on Alighieri’s surface were far from optimal. Beauregard had said they were a hundred klicks from Calder’s. So at best they would shave a tenth off the journey any would-be rescuer might make, but only a tenth.

But then this wasn’t about narrowing the distance between the crash site and Calder’s Edge.

It was about escaping the rising sun.

As they exited
Milady Frog
, Dev checked the eastern horizon. There was the faintest of glows there, a hint of reddish-orange light.

Alighieri was a small planet with a fast rotation.

Dawn would be coming soon enough.

38

T
HE THREE OF
them skirted back around the downed arcjet, taking a path that continued in the direction she’d been travelling before the crash. Dev noted missing tiles on
Milady Frog
’s belly and a scraped, dented engine nacelle. He was surprised she wasn’t in a far worse state. Beauregard had truly worked wonders.

Eyes now having adjusted to the darkness, Dev glanced back and saw a line of gouges in the rocky terrain marking
Milady Frog
’s path coming in. She had bounced five or six times like a skimming stone before fetching up to rest against a metre-high ridge.

As Beauregard had said, any landing you can walk away from...

Turning back, he looked up to the cockpit. Inside, Beauregard gave a salute. He had his feet up on the console. He didn’t look as though he was making any great effort to jump-start the arcjet.

A man resigned to his fate.

Dev saluted back, then began walking in earnest. Trundell and Stegman fell in step beside him.

The ground was mostly level plain, with here and there a bulbous outcrop of basalt or a trench-like fissure. A layer of regolith crunched underfoot, the dust of shattered rocks and cosmic debris that had settled on Alighieri over the eons. Puffs of it floated up into the thin atmosphere behind the three men as they trudged forward.

The heat radiating off the surface made the night sky waver as though it were a reflection in rippling water. The stars flickered in their constellations like tiny candle flames. The light they shed was just enough for Trundell to see by. For Dev and Stegman, with their Alighierian eyes, it was more than adequate.

Soon
Milady Frog
was a silvery twinkle in the distance, so small Dev could only just make out her amphibian contours. He pictured Wing Commander Beauregard still in the cockpit, gazing out through the windscreen, watching them go. Perhaps, to him, they were already lost in the bleak black landscape. The last fellow human beings he would ever lay eyes on – vanished.

Dev understood Beauregard’s motive in refusing even to consider taking one of the three shieldsuits. Having been through the Frontier War himself, he knew how it changed your perspective on life and death. You realised the fragility of the one and the ever-present proximity of the other. You didn’t lose the dread of dying – who did? – but you learned to make peace with death better than anyone else might, even while you cherished your life all the more.

Beauregard was meeting oblivion with acceptance in his heart and a hip flask in his hand.

There were worse ways to go.

The three men had walked a little over two kilometres before they encountered their first obstacle, a crevice four metres wide and several deep. Even if they weren’t encumbered by the shieldsuits, they would have had trouble jumping the gap.

There was no alternative but to go round.

The crevice followed a saw-tooth course for nearly a kilometre, tapering little by little until it was narrow enough for them to be able to bound across with impunity. They had had to go due south, losing a kilometre’s worth of westward travel. The sunlight would be reaching them that much sooner.

01:47:37

Next they found themselves approaching a long escarpment, which rose vertically and extended as far as the eye could see in either direction, the inner rim of a vast crater. It was perhaps ten metres high, and from a distance seemed sheer. Closer to, however, its face revealed notches and grooves that suggested it might be scalable.

The three men conferred and decided to give climbing it a try.

Is your knee up to the job, Stegosaurus?

Just watch me, Harmer.

Each of them selected a different route up the escarpment. As Dev began to climb, he realised just how restrictive the shieldsuit was. It was like being encased in armour. You couldn’t feel precisely where you were placing your hands and feet. More than once he thought he had established a firm toehold, only to have his leg shoot out under him when he pushed down on it.

He lost count of the number of times he nearly fell, but eventually he crested the brow of the small cliff. Beyond lay a sweeping expanse of boulders, like a glacial moraine. This was probably the remains of a volcanic ejecta field; that, or the detritus from some ancient meteorite impact.

Dev’s heart sank. Their already slow progress was about to get even slower.

Uh, a little help here?

The plaintive plea came from Trundell, who was near the top of the escarpment and had got into difficulties. One foot was wedged tight in a narrow fissure and he couldn’t extricate it.

Dev grabbed his wrists and heaved, but was unable to pull him free. They had to wait until Stegman finished climbing and was able to come over and join in. Together, with their combined strength, he and Dev managed to wrench Trundell up and over the rim.

Trundell lay on his belly, wheezing. Dev gave him a minute to recover as he surveyed the eastern horizon. There was a corona of golden light there now, and it seemed to be expanding and becoming more brilliant even as he watched. He had never thought the sight of a sunrise would instil him with horror.

A looped message was being beamed out by his commplant, repeating itself at five-second intervals. Dev Harmer. Down here at these GPS coordinates. In danger of getting terminated by the terminator. Any time you want to drop by and give us a lift, that’s fine with me.

Someone had to have heard Beauregard’s mayday. Someone had to be coming.

Had
to be.

But if so, how come there had been no reply yet to Dev’s message? It didn’t need to be much, a simple Hang in there, we’re on our way, that was all. Why the silence?